Heroku Heats Up Its Java Service

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Heroku Heats Up Its Java Service

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Brian Legate

Heroku is what's known a platform cloud, and some people see platform clouds as little more than online service where developers tinker with software code. But Salesforce.com – the company than now runs Heroku – hopes to change that perception.

On Wednesday, Saleforce launched a new version of the service that revamps the old pricing model and beefs up tools for building applications with the Java programming language, all with large enterprise customers in mind.

A platform cloud – aka platform-as-a-service, or PaaS – makes it easy for developers to build and run applications in the cloud without the need to configure and maintain servers, whether physical or virtual. Heroku originally launched in 2007 as a platform based on the Ruby on Rails programming framework. But since then, it has gradually added support for more languages, including Java last year.

Arguably the Java service wasn't really ready for large enterprises. But now, Salesforce believes it is. "We wanted to prove was that the tools would work for any language, that the work flow could be the same," says Jesper Joergensen, senior director of product management at Heroku.

The new service bundles Heroku's existing Java support along with new features such as a session caching layer, support for the Tomcat application server, and the ability to deploy from Java WAR files. "A single Java enterprise application has several components," says Joergensen. "Every app requires a database, a caching layer, etc. This announcement is about integrating those together and provisioning it with a single click."

As part of the launch, Heroku is also releasing plugins for the popular Java development environment Eclipse and the deployment tool Atlassian Bamboo. Joergensen says the plugins might work with other Heroku services, but for now, only Enterprise Java is officially supported.

Heroku Enterprise Java also has a completely different pricing model from the company's other services. While Heroku normally charges based on the resources you reserve for your applications, Enterprise Java will have a flat rate of $1,000 per month per production application. Joergensen thinks the new pricing model will make it easier for enterprises to evaluate, saying that although cloud pricing is generally simpler than traditional on-premise enterprise product pricing, it's still confusing. "Enterprises know how to deal with traditional pricing but they don't know how to price out cloud," he says.

Earlier this week, we talked to Sinclair Schuller, the CEO of the enterprise .NET PaaS Apprenda. Schuller argued that in order to offer true technical sophistication to PaaS users vendors need to be focused on a single language run-time. Heroku is trying to go deep in multiple languages.

"Some components, like logging, need to be consistent across all languages," Joergensen says. "But we also respect that a developer working with Java will be working very differently from a Ruby developer. Heroku is developed to support what's common but go deep on what languages need."